Phil Davies--ComputerUser's new senior editor--lives in my neighborhood and gets on my bus a few blocks down from my stop. Besides our chosen vicinage, Phil and I have a lot in common, including a broad range of journalistic experience, two-year-old sons, a love of close-range travel and camping, and a penchant for diverse music and fine wines. The other day, I was reading a Business Week report on productivity on the bus when Phil got on and sat down next to me. Though Phil is fairly new to CU, we have established a rapport that allows us to start talking about a subject without really setting it up. I started in on productivity before Phil had a chance to warm his seat.

"[Fed Chief Alan] Greenspan is so encouraged by the rise in productivity that he won't raise interest rates the rest of the year. It's kind of scary, you know. I wonder what will happen to our economy when productivity flattens out," I said.

As the bus filled up on its halting route to the interstate, Phil pondered this for a moment and looked around as though he didn't want to offend the other passengers with heady talk on a Monday morning. Then he started in: "It seems that, while many have long predicted increases in productivity due to information technology, until recently there was no evidence for increased productivity from infotech.

"Now, productivity is finally catching up to expectations, and the whole economy depends on steady growth of productivity to keep things in balance. The scary thing is we're reaching saturation on the technologies that enhance productivity--office and manufacturing automation, mostly. Once that happens, we will need something else to come along to keep productivity growing," said Phil.

I paused to ponder this as the bus headed for the car-pool lane, and I smiled as I watched the long line of single-passenger cars waiting at the meter to get on the freeway. I guess I was feeling my oats, as I didn't really care what the passengers sitting and standing next to us overheard. "I suppose the Web is the next big productivity booster. But it took nearly 15 years for word processors and other office automation to register productivity gains. Learning curves and shifting expectations ate up the efficiency until the novelty wore off. While I don't think it'll take that long for the Web to register gains, there could be some lag time before it really starts paying off," I said.

Phil lowered his voice, still uncomfortable with the curious looks my comment drew from the peanut gallery. "I think it's paying off now in how quickly workers can turn information around. And it will soon really pay off in back-end integration and other B2B [business-to-business] automation. But, at base, lots of what we do will always depend on human intervention. Unless we're all replaced by artificially intelligent [AI] agents, productivity will eventually flatten out."

As the ladies in front of us squirmed, the conversation headed to deeper waters. Now we're getting at the heart of the matter, I thought. My teaching instincts kicked in at this point, and, never wanting the pupils on the bus to feel comfortable in their Monday routines, I raised my voice slightly. "I don't believe in AI," I blurted out. To which Phil responded with an incredulous look.

"AI results in a lot of logical paradoxes," I explained. "Have you ever read the book 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'?" Phil shook his head. "Well, that book convinced me that that kind of AI--what many in the field call Strong AI--is impossible. Weak AI, like what we see in voice-recognition and search-engine technology, will grow in use, and this could enhance productivity. But human invention will never be replaced.

"Ray Kurzweil predicts that we'll all be walking around with chips in our heads in 30 years and there will come a time when we can't tell the difference between our own thoughts and those of our AI agents. I think this is hogwash. Software can never generate original thoughts. All it can do is reorganize what is already there," I said confidently. "When we come to the point where we need software to think for us in order to enhance our productivity, productivity will flatten out."

"You wrote a column about this," Phil said with a smirk. "The one that started with you puking. That was disgusting, but informative." Still, Phil was skeptical. After all, quantum mechanics is riddled with paradoxes, yet it is the basis for our understanding of the atomic structure of things. "What if you could replicate the human brain with silicon? Couldn't that be capable of original thought?" he asked.

"In my view, no," I said with flushed cheeks. It's not every day that I get this kind of question, and it was even more sweet considering that it was Monday morning on a busload of people who would rather vegetate than think deep thoughts. "We know so much about the brain, and we still can't figure out how it works. Even if we knew everything about it, we still wouldn't get at the essence of original thought. Original thought doesn't start in the brain, it starts in the spirit," I said, somewhat uncomfortable to be professing religious faith in public.

"That's your view, huh?" Phil said, not quite knowing what to say. "It's the old mind/body problem all over again." After a long pause and several uncomfortable looks from the gentleman standing in the aisle, I said, "This is some deep stuff to be talking about before most people are awake on a Monday morning." As the bus pulled up to our stop and we strutted off to work, I beamed with the prospect of many more interesting talks with Phil. I also imagined everyone on our bus wearing Walkmans on our next ride downtown.

James Mathewson is editorial director of ComputerUser.com.